On Reflecting Absence: Negativity and the Sacred at Ground Zero
The opening of Michael Arad’s Reflecting Absence, the National September 11th Memorial, in New York offers an occasion to think through the aesthetic strategies of negativity that have come to define this memorial as a paradigmatic countermemorial. This article investigates how and why the operative...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
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| Published: |
2013
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| In: |
Literature and theology
Year: 2013, Volume: 27, Issue: 4, Pages: 452-471 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | The opening of Michael Arad’s Reflecting Absence, the National September 11th Memorial, in New York offers an occasion to think through the aesthetic strategies of negativity that have come to define this memorial as a paradigmatic countermemorial. This article investigates how and why the operative metaphors of the void, absence, and deconstruction have come to serve as the ‘under-determined’ (to borrow a phrase from one of the memorial’s jurists) civic codes of that which is putatively ‘universal’ and ‘sacred’ in this context. The challenge will be to get some purchase on a complex question: What are we to make of the apparent paradox of a deconstructivist, sacred countermemorial lying at the heart of a secular, global-corporatist fantasia, the World Trade Center? While the memorial suggests an appealing conceptual model for the pluralistic accommodation of incompatible commitments, in the era of globalisation and terror, we might need to examine the material and political conditions of this putative ‘absence’. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4623 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Literature and theology
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/litthe/frt040 |